Twitter and the Network of Trust: With great power comes great responsibility

Earlier this month the Electronic Frontier Foundation published their annual study of the privacy policies for top Internet companies.

Twitter was ranked with an impressive 3.5 stars out of 4, (one of the highest on the list), highlighting its work across four areas: openness with data demands, transparency regarding requests, whether or not they fight in court for users’ privacy requests and whether or not they do so in Congress.

In our experience with working with a variety of platforms and social networks, Twitter is leading the thinking and action on how to architect a system that is both open and private. To elaborate, we want to shine a light on some of the ways that we integrate Twitter’s privacy controls in our platform. To our knowledge, no-other social-data platform delivers 100% compliance on this outside of DataSift. Let us know in the comments if you find another service that supports this!

This level of integration is not just critical for the community of Twitter users, but also for corporations that consume and analyze public social data:

If you delete your Tweet, we’ll delete the Tweet from our big-data platform, and send the delete on to anyone that would have received the original Tweet so they can remove it from their system.

Obviously, if you have a protect account or send a DM, Twitter does not distribute this data outside of their service. But, what if you had a public account and switch is to be protected? We’ll switch the account in DataSift to prevent sending out any Tweets from that user (including old Tweets). We’ll also do the same if an account is blocked or deleted.

The net-net: For companies that source their social data from DataSift, we provide the compliance controls to ensure that companies respect Twitter’s Terms of Service and ensure that users retain control their data – helping create a network of trust between Twitter users and companies creating insights from public Tweets.

Do you
think advising people that tweets have been deleted will help? Surely it
highlights the content to the end user?

And what is the point of have “in the public domain” if it can be
removed from it? You can’t undo what you say; the UK media and gov. are driving
the awareness of tweets and other social platforms being public and accountable.

Whilst your service to advise deleted tweets might seem admirable it sounds
like this to differentiate yourself from other data providers, but not actually
adding any value?